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Dublin officials see the new medical college that Ohio University has pledged to build in the
city as such an opportunity for the region that they are willing to give the university more than
70 acres to make the project happen.

As part of an agreement introduced to City Council last night, the city also would pay for any
road improvements necessary for OU’s $24 million Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, which is
planned for 7001-7003 Post Rd., just off the Rt. 33 interchange. The college is expected to open
with at least 50 students in fall 2014.

The state controlling board yesterday approved the university’s $11 million purchase of 14.8
acres and two existing buildings at the site. City Council later unveiled its plan to give the
university two tracts the city owns surrounding that land — about 71 more acres.

Dr. Pam Benoit, OU’s executive vice president and provost, was at the meeting, and Mayor Tim
Lecklider told her the project is just the beginning of a partnership with the university: “We’re
going to be with you every step of the way.”

A year go, the university announced a $105 million donation from the Osteopathic Heritage
Foundations — the largest private gift in the school’s history — to create an extended campus and
to support expanded research and treatment of diabetes.

Officials said the first $29 million of the gift would be used to buy land, build a medical
college in central Ohio and develop its campus.

Last night, Benoit said that the university’s plans for the land surrounding the new medical
college would include, by 2017, a day-care center, some residential housing, arts and cultural
facilities and research laboratories.

The agreement on Dublin’s incentives will come before council again on April 23. If it is
approved, the city would retain about 25 acres fronting the highway, with an eye toward development
to support the medical campus. Both OU and the city would have a say in deciding how that space
develops, according to the proposed agreement, and money could change hands for it in the
future.

All seemed to agree last night that the next priority would be a hotel/conference center in that
location. Benoit said work could begin on a hotel as soon as 2014.

The agreement before council says the city expects to eventually approve a
tax-increment-financing district for the area, a move that would allow for future tax payments to
be set aside in a special fund.

The university is exempt from most property taxes, but the special taxing district would be set
up for what’s not exempt, most likely the conference center or whatever development might come on
that third tract of land.

Dublin Development Director Dana McDaniel said before the meeting that the city is working to
decide where it will move the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center, which is housed in one of the
buildings that the university is buying. The city had amassed the surrounding land in hopes of
bringing in a research and/or biomedical project. This agreement makes it clear that if the
university doesn’t make good on its promise of the medical college, the donated property reverts to
Dublin.

McDaniel said he has no doubt that it will come together beautifully.

“The medical college will become an anchor for what we’ve always envisioned as an innovation
corridor,” he said. “This will be a benefit to the entire region and its efforts to make a push in
the biomedical and research fields.”